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NEWFOUNDLAND AND THE 
IINGOES 



AJV APPEAL TO ENGLAND'S HONOR 



BY 



JOHN FRETWELL 



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Boston, Mass.: Geo. H. Elms 
Toronto, Canada : Hcnter, Rose & Co 
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Copyright 1895 by John Frrtwell, 

Copyrighted im England and the United States 
Right ok Translation and Republication Reserved 



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" To be taken into the American Union is to be adopted into a part- 
nership. To belong as a Crown Colony to the British Empire, as things 
stand, is no partnership at all. 

" It is to belong to a power which sacrifices, as it has always sacri- 
ficed, the interest of its dependencies to its own. The blood runs freely 
through every vein and artery of the American body corporate. Every 
single citizen feels his share in the life of his nation. Great Britain 
leaves her Colonies to take care of themselves, refuses what they ask, 
and forces on them what they had rather be without. 

" If I were a West Indian, I should feel that under the stars and 
stripes I should be safer than I was at present from political experi- 
menting. I should have a market in which to sell my produce where I 
should be treated as a friend. I should have a power behind me and 
protecting me, and I should have a future to which I could look for- 
ward with confidence. America would restore me to hope and life : 
Great Britain allows me to sink, contenting herself with advising me to 
be patient. Why should I continue loyal when my loyalty was so con- 
temptuously valued?" — James Anthony Froude (from "The Eng- 
lish in the West Indies," Nov. 15, 1887). 

'• In the United States is Canada's natural market for buying as well 
as for selling, the market which her productions are always struggling 
to enter through every opening in the tariff wall, for e.xclusion from 
which no distant market either in England or elsewhere can compensate 
her, the want of which brings on her commercial atrophy, and drives 
the flower of her youth by thousands and tens of thousands over the 
line. 

"The Canadian North-west remains unpeopled while the neighboring 
States of the Union are peopled, because it is cut off from the con- 
tinent to which it belongs by a fiscal and political line." — Goldwin 
Smith, D.C.L., in "Questions of the Day," page 159 (Macmillan & 
Co., London, 1893). 



PREFACE. 



It would be evidence of gross ignorance, or something 
worse, to pretend that the United States, under Hke condi- 
tions, would have treated the Newfoundlanders better than 
England has done. It would be especially so after the 
humiliating spectacle presented to the world by our Demo- 
cratic majorities last year in Congress and in the State 
and city of New York. 

With material resources superior to those of any other 
country in the world, we are obliged to appeal to the 
European money-lender for gold. 

Even the chosen head of our Tory Democracy tells 
Congress that we must sacrifice $16,000,000 to obtain 
gold on the terms offered by his Secretary of the Treas- 
ury. 

England's past blunders have been singularly favorable 
to American interests, when real statesmen were at the 
helm in Washington. Any strategist can see that, if 
Lord Palmerston, instead of bullying weak Greece and 
China, had done justice to Newfoundland, his govern- 
ment might have acquired so strong a position in Amer- 
ica as to seriously imperil the preservation of the Union 
some thirty years ago. That he failed to do his duty was 
as fortunate for the United States as it was unfortunate 
for Newfoundland. To-day, but for the emasculating in- 



6 PREFACE 

fluence of our Tory Democracy, England's blunders in 
the same island would be profitable to the United States. 

Even for our small and expensive navy we cannot find 
sufficient able seamen among our citizens ; and the starving 
fishermen of Newfoundland are just the men we need. But 
there is no money in the national treasury to pay them ; 
while our ridiculous immigration and suffrage laws exclude 
the men we need, and enable the scum of Europe to in- 
fluence our legislation. 

I trust this tract may suggest to some Englishmen the 
best way to prevent a repetition of the present distress, 
and so show the world that, after all, loyalty is sometimes 
appreciated in imperial circles. The old project of a rapid 
line of steamers from Bay St. George to Chaleurs Bay, 
giving England communication \ia Newfoundland with 
Montreal in less than five days, has been revived ; but the 
route is closed by winter ice, and too far north for the 
United States. 

A better route, open all the year round, is that from Port 
aux Basques to Neil's Cove, a distance of only fifty-two 
miles by sea against two hundred and fifty miles from Bay 
St. George to Paspebiac or Shippegan ; and still better is the 
route via Port aux Basques and Louisbourg, W'hich will soon 
be connected with the American lines, with a single break 
of three miles at the Gut of Canso Ferry. With all its 
faults. British rule has one advantage over that of all other 
colonial powers : it gives the foreigner, no matter what his 
faith or nation, exactly the same commercial rights as the 
British subject ; and so, although Newfoundland will lose by 
the exclusion of its fish from our protected markets, and by 
the diplomatic inability of the British government to pro- 



tect it from the effects of French bounties and treaty rights, 
the enUghtened selfishness of the New Englander will find 
that " there is money for him " in the development of those 
resources which have been so singularly neglected by the 
British capitalists who invest their money in the most rotten 
schemes that Yankee ingenuity can invent. 

J. F. 
Feb II, 1895. 



AUTHORITIES. 



In the following pages I have drawn largely on the well-known works 
of Hatton and Harvey, Bonnycastle, Pedley, Bishop Hovvley, and Spear- 
man's article in the Westminster Review for 1892, concerning Newfound- 
land ; and, on the general question, on Froude's " England to the Defeat 
of the Spanish Armada," Lecky's " History of England in the Eighteenth 
Century," Blaine's " Twenty Years of Congress," Hansard's Debates, 
"The Annual Register,'' McCarthy's " History of our own Times," and 
the Blue Books of the British government. 

To the tourist who proposes to visit the island I can recommend 
Rev. Moses Harvey's "Newfoundland in 1894," published in St. John's, 
as the best guide to the island. Mr. Harvey has also written an excel- 
lent article on the island for Baedeker's "Canada." Eor the hunter, 
painter, photographer, angler, yachtsman, or geologist, there is not a 
more attractive excursion, for from one to three months, along the 
whole American coast than that through and round Newfoundland. 

J. F. 



NEWFOUNDLAND AND THE JINGOES. 

BY JOHN FRETWELL. 

The most prominent and able intellectual representative 
of the money power in the world, the London Times, writes 
of Newfoundland : — 

" Even if we were disposed to do so, we cannot in our 
position as a naval power view with indifference the disaster 
to, and possibly the ruin of, a colony we may sometimes re- 
gard as amongst the most valuable of our naval stations. 
Neither can we view the position without consideration for 
the wide-spread suffering that an absolute refusal to grant 
assistance would entail. It is probable that a cheaper sys- 
tem of administration would retrieve the position without 
casting an overwhelmingly heavy burden upon the imperial 
tax-payers. If we interpret public feeling aright, it will be 
in favor of giving the colony the help that may be found 
essential ; but, if the assistance required takes anything like 
the radical proportion that at present seems necessary, it 
can only be granted at a price, — the surrender of the Con- 
stitution and the return of Newfoundland to the condition of 
a crown colony." 

While we may safely concede to the editors of the Times 
as much " consideration for wide-spread suffering " as to a 
Jay Gould or a Napoleon, the above-quoted words are sig- 
nificant, because they show that what the ruling powers in 
England would never concede to charity or justice they will 
give to self-interest, now that the Times has discovered 
"there is money in it." 

But to us Americans the words have their lesson also. 
Newfoundland not only belongs to our Continental system. 



lO THE CRADLE OF ENGLAND S NAVY 

but it can never be really prosperous until it becomes a 
State in our Union. What it is to-day, New England might 
have been, had it not been delivered by the Continental 
forces, and by the French navy, from the rule of British 
Tories. And, as a member of our Union, this island, five 
times the size of Massachusetts, might not only be as pros- 
perous as Rhode Island or Connecticut, but also the chief 
training ground for our future navy, which, checked by the 
piracies of the British-built " Alabama," will become in the 
near future an indispensable necessity of our national ex- 
istence. 

Since the English people seem to have taken to heart, far 
more than his own countrymen have done, the lesson taught 
by our Captain Mahan in his " Influence of the Sea-power 
in History," it is well that we should consider the past 
history of England's relations to that first-born colony 
which she has so infamously sacrificed, and for whose mis- 
fortunes she alone is responsible. 

The lesson that we may learn from that history is quite 
as much needed by the American as by the Briton. Ed- 
mund R. Spearman, writing in the Westminster Review (Vol. 
137. page 403. 1892), says: — 

" No English Homer has yet risen to tell the tale of New- 
foundland, shrouded in mystery and romance, the daring 
invasion and vicissitudes of those exhaustless fisheries, 
the battle of life in that seething cauldron of the North 
Atlantic, where the swelling billows never rest, and the hur- 
ricane only slumbers to bring forth the worse dangers of 
the fog-bank and the iceberg. Fierce as has been during 
the four centuries the fight for the fisheries by European 
rivals, their petty racial quarrels sink into insignificance 
before the general struggle for the harvest. The Atlantic 
roar hides all minor pipings. The breed of fisher-folk from 
these deep-sea voyagings consist of the toughest specimens 
of human endurance. All other dangers which lure men to 
venture everything for excitement or for fortune, the torrid 



QUEEN ELIZABETH S FAULTS I i 

heat or arctic cold, the battle against man or beast, the 
desert or the jungle, all land adventures are as nothing com- 
pared to the daring of the hourly existence of the heroic 
souls whose lives are cast upon the banks of Newfoundland. 
The fishermen may seem wild and reckless, rough and illit- 
erate ; but supreme danger and superlative sacrifice breed 
noble qualities, and beneath the rough exterior of the fisher- 
man you will never fail to find a man, and no cheap imita- 
tion of the genuine article. None but a man can face for a 
second time the frown of the North Atlantic, that exhibition 
of mighty, all-consuming power, beside the sober reality of 
which all the ecstasies of poets and painters are puny 
failures. Among these heroes of the sea England's children 
have always been foremost. We should expect England to 
be especially proud of such an offspring, familiar with their 
struggles, and ever heedful of their welfare, lending an ear 
to their claims or complaints above all others. Strange to 
say, it has always been the exact reverse." 

Though discovered by John and Sebastian Cabot in 1494, 
"the twenty-fourth of June at five o'clock in the morning," it 
was not until ninety years later that the island was formally 
organized as an English colony (Aug. 5, 1582, by Sir Hum- 
phrey Gilbert). 

The persecutions of Bloody Mary and the massacre of 
St. Bartholomew had roused the indignation of English- 
men to the highest pitch. They were ready for any risk in 
open war against France and Spain, but Queen Elizabeth 
was always trying to shirk responsibility ; and so the sea- 
captains who would avenge the wrongs done to the Protes- 
tants were obliged to run the risk of being condemned as 
pirates. 

One of them wrote to Queen Elizabeth, Nov. 6, 1577, of- 
fering to fit out ships, well armed, for the Banks of New- 
foundland, where some twenty-five thousand fishermen went 
out from France, Spain, and Portugal every summer to 
catch the food of their Catholic fast days. He proposed to 



12 QUEEN ELIZABETH S FAULTS 

treat these fishermen as the Huguenots of France had been 
treated, — to bring away the best of their ships, and to burn 
the rest. Nine days after the date of this letter Francis 
Drake sailed from Plymouth, commanding a fleet of five 
ships, equipped by a company of private adventurers, of 
whom Queen Elizabeth was the largest shareholder. Fort- 
unately, they never committed the horrible crime suggested 
in that letter. In those five ships, says Froude, lay the 
germ of Great Britain's ocean empire. 

In 1585 Sir John Hawkins, who had meanwhile annexed 
Newfoundland to the English Dominion, proposed again to 
take a fleet to the Fishing Banks, whither half the sailors of 
Spain and Portugal went annually to fish for cod. 

He would destroy them all at one fell swoop, cripple the 
Spanish marine for years, and leave the galleons to rot in 
the harbors for want of sailors to man them. 

Had this been done, Philip of Spain would never have 
been able to threaten England with his " Invincible Ar- 
mada." But the brave Englishmen of those days had to 
deal with a treacherous queen. The Hollanders who had 
engaged in a desperate struggle that they might have done 
with lies, and serve God with honesty and sincerity, were 
willing and eager to be annexed to England, and in union 
with her would have formed so strong a power as to be able 
to resist any Continental league against them. 

But Elizabeth cared more for herself than for her country 
and her cause, and thus made warlike measures necessary 
which an Oliver Cromwell would have avoided. 

Her duplicity may have provoked those republican ideas 
that were brought by Brewster and the other Pilgrim 
Fathers to America. Brewster was the friend and compan- 
ion of Davison, Queen Elizabeth's Secretary of State, who 
was sent on an embassy to the Netherlands by her ; and the 
contrast between these brave citizens and the treachery of 
the "good Queen Bess" must have given him a profound 
sense of the injury done to a great nation by the vices and 
follies of royalty. 



THE SETTLEMENT OF CALVERT I3 

The infamous manner in which the queen afterwards 
used her faithful secretary, Davison, as her scapegoat, and 
the sycophancy of Sandys, Archbishop of York, at Davi- 
son's mock trial, were strong arguments both against royalty 
and prelacy. 

Under the cowardly, childish, and pedantic king who suc- 
ceeded Elizabeth, Newfoundland was the bone of contention 
between the factions at his court, between Catholics and 
Protestants, and men who were neither, and men who were 
both. 

Among the latter was the gallant Yorkshireman, Sir 
George Calvert, who was Secretary of State to James, but 
was compelled to resign his office in 1624, because he be- 
came a Catholic. 

The British and Irish Catholics who came over seem to 
have been the men who came out to Newfoundland v.'ith the 
most honest intent of any, — to better themselves without 
injury to others, and to seek there "freedom to worship 
God " at a time when that freedom was denied in England, 
both to the Catholic and the Puritan. In 1620 Calvert had 
bought a patent conveying to him the lordship of all the 
south-eastern peninsula, which he called Avalon, the ancient 
name of Glastonbury in England. 

He proposed to found there an asylum for the persecuted 
Catholics; and at a little harbor on the eastern shore, just 
south of Cape Broyle, which he called Verulam, a name 
since corrupted to Ferryland, he built a noble mansion, and 
spent altogether some $150,000, a much larger sum in those 
days than it seems now. But the site was ill chosen ; and 
the imbecility of King James encouraged the French to at- 
tack the colony, so that at last Calvert wrote to Burleigh, 
'' I came here to plant and set and sow, but have had to 
fall to fighting Frenchmen." He went home, and in the 
last year of his life he obtained a grant of land, which is now 
occupied by the States of Delaware and Maryland ; and to 
its chief city his son gave the name of the wild Irish head- 



14 CHARLES THE LIBERTINE 

land and fishing village, whence he took his own name of 
Lord Baltimore in the Irish peerage. 

After Calvert's departure, the Lord Lieutenant of Ire- 
land sent out a number of settlers; and in 1638 Sir David 
Kirke, one of the bravest of England's sea-captains, who 
had taken Quebec, received from Charles L a grant of all 
Newfoundland, and settled at Verulam, or Ferryland, the 
place founded by Calvert. Under Kirke the colony pros- 
pered; but, as he took the part of Charles in the civil war, 
his possessions were confiscated by the victorious Common- 
wealth. 

At that time there were nearly two thousand settlers 
along the eastern shore of Avalon ; and the great Protector, 
Oliver Cromwell, protected the rights of the Newfoundland 
settlers as he did those of the Waldensians. 

After his death came what Mr. Spearman calls the 
" blots in the English history known as the reigns of 
Charles IL and his deposed brother." 

Mr. Spearman continues, "Frenchmen must understand 
that no Englishman will for a moment accept as a prece- 
dent anything in those two reigns affecting the relations of 
France and of England." 

But here Mr. Spearman counts without his host. He 
should recollect that the British government has, since the 
death of Charles IL, paid an annual pension to the Dukes 
of Richmond simply because they were descended from the 
Frenchwoman, Louise de la Querouaille, whose influence in- 
duced Charles II. to betray English interests to France, 
and that but the other day the Salisbury government recog- 
nized that precedent by paying the Duke of Richmond a 
very large sum of money to buy off this infamous claim. 
So long as the names of the Dukes of Richmond and 
Saint Alban's (both descendants of Charles II.'s mis- 
tresses) remain on the roll of the British Peerage, the 
Frenchman will have a right to laugh at Mr. Spearman's 
claim ; for we cannot ignore a precedent in our intercourse 



SETTLEMENTS OF FRANCE 



15 



with foreigners, so long as we act upon it in our domestic 
affairs. 

Scarcely was Charles the Libertine seated on the throne 
of England, when the Frenchmen, in 1660, settled on the 
southern shore of Newfoundland, at a place which they 
called La Plaisance (now known as Placentia). 

They were certainly either wiser or more fortunate in 
their choice of a location than the PLnglish ; for, while St. 
John's and Ferryland, on the straight shore of Avalon, are 
exposed to the wildest gales of the Atlantic, and shut out by 
the arctic ice from all communication with the ocean for a 
part of the winter, Placentia is a protected harbor, open all 
the year round, and having a sheltered waterway navigable 
for the largest ships to the northernmost and narrowest 
part of the Isthmus of Avalon. 

We must believe that the French would have managed 
Newfoundland better than the English if they had kept the 
island ; for the men who cut the Isthmus of Suez would 
surely long ago have made a passage, three miles long, by 
which the ships of Trinity Bay might have found their way 
at the close of autumn to the safe winter harbors of the 
southern coast. 

All along the southern shore the names on the map tell 
us of French occupation. 

Port aux Basques, Harbor Breton, Rencontre Bay (called 
by the English Round Covmter), Cape La Hune, Bay 
d'Espoir, are but a few of them. 

The name which the English have given to this last 
is strangely characteristic. The Bay of Hope (Baie d'Es- 
poir) of the French has been changed into the Bay of De- 
spair of the English. It was really a Bay of Hope to the 
French ; for from the head of one of its fiords, deep enough 
for the largest of our modern ships, an Indian trail goes 
northwards in less than 100 miles to the fertile valley of 
the Exploits River. Can we suppose that the French en- 
gineers would have allowed 200 vears to elapse without 



l6 ENGLISH OPPRESSION 

building a road along this trail ? And yet not a single road 
was built by the English conquerors before the year 1825; 
and even to-day, to reach the point where the Indian trail 
crosses the Exploits, we must travel 260 miles by rail from 
Placentia or St. John's instead of 100 from Bay d'Espoir, 
simply because the English holders of property in St. 
John's, like dogs in the manger, will not permit any improve- 
ment in the country, unless it can be made tributary to 
their special interests. 

That the English were worse enemies of Newfoundland 
than the French, even in King Charles's time, may be seen 
from the advice given by Sir Josiah Child, the chairman of 
that great monopoly, the East India Company, that the 
island " was to have no government, nor inhabitants per- 
mitted to reside at Newfoundland, nor any passengers or 
private boat-keepers permitted to fish at Newfoundland." 

The Lords of the Committee for Trade and Plantations 
adopted the suggestion of Sir Josiah; and in 1676, just a 
century before the American Declaration of Independence, 
the west country adventurers began to drive away the resi- 
dent inhabitants, and to take possession of their houses and 
fishing stages, and did so much damage in three weeks that 
Thomas Oxford declared 1,500 men could not make it good. 

We should be unjust if we were to regard this infamous 
dishonesty as simply an accident of the Restoration time. 
Many of my American readers have doubtless heard of an 
island called Ireland, which is much nearer to England 
than Newfoundland. Lecky tells us how the English 
land-owners, always foremost in selfishness, procured the 
enactment of laws, in 1665 and 1680, absolutely prohibiting 
the importation into England from Ireland of all cattle, 
sheep, and swine, of beef, pork, bacon, and mutton, and 
even of butter and cheese, with the natural result that the 
French were enabled to procure these provisions at lower 
prices, and their work of settling their sugar plantations 
was much facilitated thereby. 



INJUSTICE TO IRELAND 1 7 

In the Navigation Act of 1663 Ireland was deprived of 
aU the advantages accorded to English ones, and thus lost 
her colonial trade ; and, after the Revolution, the commer- 
cial influence, which then became supreme in the councils 
of England, was almost as hostile to Ireland as that of the 
Tory landlords. A Parliament was summoned in Dublin, 
in 1698, for the express purpose of destroying Irish indus- 
try ; and a year later the Irish were prohibited from export- 
ing their manufactured wool to any other country whatever. 
Prohibitive duties were imposed on Irish sail-cloth imported 
into England. Irish checked, striped, and dyed linens were 
absolutely excluded from the colonies, and burdened with 
a duty of 30 per cent, if imported into England. Ireland 
was not allowed to participate in the bounties granted 
for the exportation of these descriptions of linen from 
Great Britain to foreign countries. In 1698 two petitions, 
from Folkestone and Aldborough, were presented to Par- 
liament, complaining of the injury done to the fishermen 
of those towns " by the Irish catching herrings at Water- 
ford and Wexford, and sending them to the Straits, and 
thereby forestalling and ruining petitioners' markets " ; 
and there was even a party in England who desired to 
prohibit all fisheries on the Irish shore except by boats 
built and manned by Englishmen. 

Not only were the Irish prevented from earning money, 
but they were forced to pay large sums to the mistresses 
■of English kings. Lecky tells us that the Duke of Saint 
Alban's, the bastard son of Charles II., enjoyed an Irish 
pension of ;^8oo a year. Catherine Sedley, the mistress 
of James II., had another of ;^5,ooo a year. William III. 
bestowed a considerable Irish estate on his mistress, Eliza- 
beth Villiers. The Duchess of Kendall and the Countess 
of Darlington, two mistresses of the German Protestant 
George I., had Irish pensions of the united value of ^5,000. 
Lady Walsingham, daughter of the first-named of these 
mistresses, had an Irish pension of ;^i,5oo; and Lady 



l8 RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION 

Howe, daughter of the second, had a pension of ;^5oo. 
Madame de Walmoden, mistress of the German Protestant 
King George II., had an Irish pension of ;^3,ooo. This 
king's sister, the queen dowager of Prussia, Count Berns- 
dorff, a prominent German politician, and a number of 
other German names may be found on the Irish pension 

list. 

Lecky's description of the Protestant Church of Ireland 
is just as revolting. Archbishop Bolton wrote, "A true 
Irish bishop [meaning bishops of English birth and of the 
Protestant Church] has nothing more to do than to eat, 
drink, grow fat and rich, and die." 

The English primate of Ireland ordained and placed in 
an Irish living a Hampshire deer-stealer, who had only 
saved himself from the gallows by turning informer against 
his comrades. Archbishop King wrote to Addison, "You 
make nothing in England of ordering us to provide for 
such and such a man ^200 per annum, and, when he has 
it, by favor of the government, he thinks he may be excused 
attendance ; but you do not consider that such a disposition 
takes up, perhaps, a tenth part of the diocese, and turns 
off the cure of ten parishes to one curate." 

From the very highest appointment to the lowest, in 
secular and sacred things, all departments of administra- 
tion in Ireland were given over as a prey to rapacious 
jobbers. Charles Lucas, M.P. for Dublin, wrote in 1761 
to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, " Your excellency will 
often find the most infamous of men, the very outcasts of 
Britain, put into the highest employments or loaded with 
exorbitant pensions ; while all that ministered and gave 
sanction to the most shameful and destructive measures 
of such viceroys never failed of an ample share in the 
spoils of a plundered people." 

Arthur Young, in 1779, estimated the rents of absentee 
landlords alone at ^732,000; and Hutchinson, in the same 
year, stated that the sums remitted from Ireland to Great 



PEACE OF UTRECHT 19 

Britain for rents, interest of money, pensions, salaries, and 
profit of offices amounted, on the lowest computation (from 
1668 to 1773), to ^1,110,000 yearly. 

If, in treating of Newfoundland, I have made many ex- 
tracts from Mr. Lecky's references to Ireland, it is in order 
that I may show Mr. Spearman the danger of laying too 
much stress on the French claims as the cause of the 
present distress in England's oldest colony. 

France had no claims in Ireland, and yet the conduct of 
the British government and the British tradesman to that 
unfortunate island is one of the blackest infamies of the 
eighteenth century. 

Mr. Lecky says in Chapter V., page ir, of his history: 
" To a sagacious observer of colonial politics two facts were 
becoming evident. The one was that the deliberate and 
malignant selfishness of English commercial legislation was 
digging a chasm between the mother country and the colo- 
nies which must inevitably, when the latter had become suf- 
ficiently strong, lead to separation. The other was that the 
presence of the French in Canada was an essential condition 
of the maintenance of the British empire in America." 

If Mr. Lecky had studied Newfoundland's history, he 
might have added a third fact ; namely, that the French 
claims in Newfoundland have been for the Jingoes of the 
last half-century a convenient means of excuse for shirking 
their own responsibility to the unfortunate island, and for 
covering up the malignant selfishness of those tradesmen 
in Canada and England to whose private interests the 
island has been sacrificed by. the government. 

It is interesting to observe how, at the time of the Peace 
of Utrecht, on Article XIII. of which the modern claims of 
France are based, the conditions were similar to those of 
Tory intrigue to-day. 

King Louis of France, encouraged by the momentary su- 
premacy of the Tories in England, had insulted the English 
people by recognizing the Pretender as King of England. 



20 TORY INTRIGUES 

The popular indignation roused by this insult enabled 
King William, by dissolving Parliament, to overthrow the 
Tory power, and obtain a large majority pledged to war 
with France. The Whigs carried this war to a victorious 
conclusion ; but, most unfortunately for both England and 
its colonies, Abigail Masham, by her influence over the 
queen, secured the overthrow of the Whigs. And her cousin 
Harley, a Tory, became Chancellor of the Exchequer, thus 
permitting the Tories to reap the fruits of Whig victories. 
In reference to the conclusion of the peace with France 
'Lecky says, " The tortuous proceedings that terminated in 
the Peace of Utrecht form, beyond all question, one of the 
most shameful pages in English history." 

The greatest of England's generals was removed from the 
head of the army, and replaced by a Tory of no military 
ability. The allies of England were most basely deserted ; 
and a clause was inserted in the treaty respecting New- 
foundland to the following effect : — 

'' But it is allowed to the subjects of France to practise 
fishing and to dry fish on land in that part only which 
stretches from the place called Bonavista to the Northern 
Point of the said Island, and from thence, running down by 
the Western Side, reaches as far as the place called Point 
Riche." 

What compensation was given by France in return for 
this right to catch and dry fish on a part of the Newfound- 
land shore ? 

That was the immense accession of guilty wealth acquired 
by the Assiento Treaty, by which England obtained the 
monopoly of the slave-trade to the Spanish colonies. 

In the one hundred and six years from 1680 to 1786 Eng- 
land sent 2,130,000 slaves to America and the West Indies. 

On this point Lecky writes : " It may not be uninterest- 
ing to observe that, among the few parts of the Peace of 
Utrecht which appear to have given unqualified satisfaction 
at home, was the Assiento contract, which made of England 



SLAVE TRADE 21 

the great slave-trader of the world. The last prelate who took 
a leading part in English poUtics affixed his signature to 
the treaty. A Te Deum, ■ composed by Handel, was sung 
in thanksgiving in the churches. Theological passions had 
been recently more vehemently aroused ; and theological 
controversies had for some years acquired a wider and 
more absorbing interest in England than in any period 
since the Commonwealth. But it does not yet appear to 
have occurred to any class that a national policy, which 
made it its main object to encourage the kidnapping of tens 
of thousands of negroes, and their consignment to the most 
miserable slavery, might be at least as inconsistent with the 
spirit of the Christian religion as either the establishment of 
Presbyterianism or the toleration of prelacy in Scotland.'' 

Is it not characteristic that, just as the Tories of Queen 
Anne's time were willing to prejudice the rights of a colony 
in return for the infamous profits of the slave-trade, so the 
Tory of 1862, Lord Robert Cecil, was among the chief Eng- 
lishmen who sympathized with the slaveholders who were 
then attacking the American Union ? 

It is equally characteristic that this first of the Primrose 
Dames, Abigail Masham, quarrelled wdth her cousin Harley 
about the share which this lady of High Church principles 
was to receive out of the profits of the infamous trade. 

Surely, the country that made so much profit out of the 
slave-trade is bound to compensate Newfoundland for the 
losses caused by its weakness in the French shore question 
rather than that France which in 17 13 abandoned the in- 
famous traffic to the British Tories. 

The next treaty between France and England, that of 
Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1748, made no alteration in the New- 
foundland question ; but the government of England, in 
returning Louisbourg to the French, gave another of those 
proofs of the selfish indifference of the home government 
to the rights of the colonies which was one of the most 
potent causes that led the New Englanders, wdth the aid of 
France, to achieve their independence. 



22 LOUISBOURG AND AIX-LA-CHAPELLE 

At the south-eastern extremity of Cape Breton Island 
the strong fortress of Louisbourg, which it was once the 
fashion to call the Gibraltar of America, threatened the 
safety of the New England and Newfoundland fisheries 
alike. Governor Shirley of Massachusetts induced the 
legislature to undertake an expedition against this fortress, 
and intrusted its command to Colonel William Pepperell. 
The New England forces, raw troops, commanded by un- 
trained officers, astonished the world by capturing a fortress 
which was deemed impregnable. This was the most brill- 
iant and decisive achievement of nine years of otherwise 
useless bloodshed and treachery. 

It is well that the people of the United States propose to 
celebrate its one hundred and fiftieth anniversary this year; 
for, more than any other event in their colonial history, it gave 
them confidence in the power of untrained men of spirit to 
overcome the hireling soldiers of the European governments. 

But the action of the British government at the Treaty of 
Aix-la-Chapelle, in restoring this fortress to the French, 
gave the colonists an equally necessary lesson. What did 
England get in exchange ? The already mentioned Assi- 
ento, that famous compact which gave to England the right 
to ship slaves to the Spanish colonies, was confirmed for the 
four years it still had to run ; and the fortress of Madras, 
which had been taken by the French in 1746, was restored 
to England in 1748 by the treaty. Even the most selfish 
and heartless of British politicians may doubt whether the 
true interests of his country were served by abandoning 
the American fortress for that of India ; but the American 
statesman will not fail to see in the conduct of England 
towards her American colonists in this transaction a justifi- 
cation not alone for the Declaration of Independence, but 
also for that Monroe doctrine which, in its fullest applica- 
tion, will prevent the interference of any European power in 
the affairs of any part of America, not excluding Newfound- 
land. The Treaty of Paris, in 1763, which made Great 



ENGLISH PERSECUTIONS IN IRELAND 



23 



Britain practically master of North America, produced no 
change in the position of the 13,000 settlers then in New- 
foundland. For them the London government cared noth- 
ing. The provisions of the treaty, by which France gave 
up Canada to England, only served to emphasize more 
strongly the injustice done by England to her Catholic 
population, both in Ireland and in Newfoundland. 

In 1719 the Irish Privy Council, all tools of England, 
actually proposed to the London government that every 
unregistered priest or friar remaining in Ireland after the 
ist of May, 1720, should be castrated; and, although the 
English ministers did not accept this suggestion, they 
adopted one that such priests should have a large P 
branded with a red-hot iron on their cheeks. It can be 
hardly wondered at that the more honest Irishmen sought 
refuge from such infamies either in foreign service or in the 
colonies , and many of them came to Newfoundland, only 
to find that the Church of England spirit of persecution was 
rampant there also. 

Every government official was obliged to abjure the spe- 
cial tenets of Catholicism. In 1755 Governor Darrell com- 
manded all masters of vessels who brought out Irish 
passengers to carry them back at the close of the fishing 
season. A special tax was levied on Roman Catholics, and 
the celebration of mass was made a penal offence. At Har- 
bor Main, Sept. 25, 1755, the magistrates were ordered to 
fine a certain man ;^5o because he had allowed a priest 
to celebrate mass in one of his fishing-rooms. The room 
was ordered to be demolished, and the owner to sell his 
possessions and quit the harbor. Another who was present 
at the same mass was fined ;^2o, and his house and stage 
destroyed by fire. Other Catholics, who had not been pres- 
ent, were fined ;{J"io each, and ordered to leave the settle- 
ment. These infamies were not altered until the Tory 
government was humiliated by the victory of the United 
States and their alhes. But even then the Newfoundland 



24 NEWFOUNDLAND LOYALTY 

settlers were taught that England treats her loyal colonist 
more harshly than the possible rebel. 

The Newfoundland settlers, Catholic or Protestant, had 
proved the most loyal men in the colony. 

When the French, under D'Iberville, captured St. John's, 
and all Newfoundland lay at their feet, the solitary excep- 
tion was the little Island of Carbonear in Conception Bay, 
where the persecuted settler John Pynn and his gallant 
band still held aloft the British flag. In 1704-5 St. John's 
was again laid waste by the French, under Subercase ; 
and, although Colonel Moody successfully defended the 
fort, the town was burned, and all the settlements about 
Conception Bay were raided by the French and their Indian 
allies. But Pynn and Davis bravely and successfully de- 
fended their island Gibraltar in Conception Bay. 

In 1708 Saint Ovide surprised and captured St. John's, 
but again old John Pynn held the fort at Carbonear. 

In the American War one of Pynn's descendants, a clerk 
at Harbor Grace, raised a company of grenadiers from 
Conception Bay ; and they fought with such success in 
Canada that he was knighted as Sir Henry Pynn, and 
raised to the rank of general. But the selfish government 
at home cared nothing for Newfoundland. The first Con- 
gress of the United States, Sept. 5, 1774, forbade all ex- 
ports to the British possessions. This would not have hurt 
Newfoundland if the settlers had been allowed to carry 
on agricultural pursuits there. But these had always been 
discouraged by the English ; and so they were dependent 
on the New England States for their supplies, and were 
threatened with absolute famine as soon as the war broke 
out. Had they been disloyal, they might have gained their 
rights from England ; but their very loyalty to such a gov- 
ernment was their worst misfortune. 

Even in 1783 the Englishman had not learned the evil 
results of permitting royal interference in British politics. 
It is not merely in the reigns of the libertine kings that we 



INFLUENCE OF ROYALTY 25 

see this. Queen Elizabeth injured England by interfering 
with the poUcy of its wisest statesmen. The ascendency of 
Harley and Saint John Bolingbroke, who deserted Eng- 
land's allies and threw away the fruits of Marlborough's 
victories, was due to the influence of a High Church wait- 
ing-woman over Queen Anne ; and now, when even Lord 
North, to say nothing of the better class of Englishmen, dis- 
approved of George III.'s obstinate resistance to the just 
claims of the American colonies, the support given to the 
king by the Tories led to the loss of a dominion far more 
valuable to England than all the trade of India or China. 

He was obliged to call on a Liberal minister to undo, as 
far as possible, the evil done by himself and the Tories, 
just as in later days Mr. Gladstone had to settle with the 
United States the damage done by the Tories in the " Ala- 
bama" question. 

The death of Rockingham left the direction of the nego- 
tiations with France and the LTnited States in the hands of 
Lord Shelburne ; and that he was extremely liberal in his 
arrangements with both countries was not to be wondered 
at. The wrong had been done by England ; and the inno- 
cent English had to suffer, as well as the guilty ones. Un- 
fortunately for Newfoundland, Shelburne did not cede this 
island to the United States ; and so it had to bear more 
than its share in the misfortunes which the policy of King 
George had brought upon the British empire. 

Mr. Spearman (page 411) writes that "Adams, the 
United States envoy, himself bred up among the New Eng- 
land fishermen, said ' he would fight the war all over again ' 
rather than give up the ancestral right of the New Eng- 
landers to the Newfoundland fisheries " ; but that Shel- 
burne should be able, when J'rance and America were victo- 
rious, to take away from the former power the concessions 
made to it by the Tories in 17 13 and in 1763 was not to be 
expected. 

There was a sligrht alteration in the shore line on which 



26 DR. O DONNELL 

the French might fish. They abandoned that right between 
Cape Bonavista and Cape St. John, in consideration of 
being allowed to catch and dry their fish along the shore 
between Point Riche and Cape Ray. That was all ; and 
that is precisely the reason why the Beaconsfield-Salisbury 
cabinet, in 1878, refused their sanction to the Bay St. 
George Railroad. 

The only advantage that the poor Newfoundlanders gained 
from the war which caused them so much distress was the 
fact that the English government was tuhipped into conced- 
ing to their Roman Catholic population some of the rights 
Avhich for many years afterwards it obstinately withheld 
from their brethren in Ireland. 

In 1784 Vice- Admiral John Campbell, a man of liberal, 
enlightened spirit, was appointed governor, and issued an 
order that all persons inhabiting the island were to have 
full liberty of conscience, and the free exercise of all such 
modes of religious worship as were not prohibited hy late. 

In the same year the Rev. Dr. OT3onnell came out to 
Newfoundland as its prefect apostolic. But the liberal 
movement did not last long. Lord Shelburne retired, and 
from 1784 till the passing of the Reform Bill in 1832 the 
Tories mismanaged the affairs of Great Britain and her 
colonies. 

One great advantage of American independence was that 
it gave the world a fair chance of judging between the results 
of republican and royal government in colonial affairs. 

We have certainly much that is rotten in the United 
States ; but, when we compare our republic at its worst with 
British colonial administration, we can find good reason to 
be thankful for the crowning mercy of 1781, when Washing- 
ton, Lafayette, and De Grasse gained their decisive victory 
over the troops of King George. 

I will not now refer to England's use of her immense 
power in India, China, and Japan. As I watched the course 
of the Congress of Religions at Chicago in 1893, I could 



CHURCH INTOLERANCE 27 

not help thinking that the impressions taken from that 
Congress by our Oriental visitors would bear fruit that in 
clue course may teach even his Grace, the Archbishop of 
Canterbury, something about England's criminal neglect 
of Christian duty to these people. For us it is enough to 
compare our position with that of the two unfortunate 
islands nearer our own shores, Ireland and Newfoundland. 

Suppose we had been cursed with the rule of British 
Tories since 1783, is it likely that our condition would have 
been better than that of these islands ? 

Even such small instalments of justice as Mr. Gladstone 
has been able to secure through his splendid fight for " jus- 
tice to Ireland " are due far more to the pressure exercised 
on England by the Irish in America than to British sense of 
right. Poor Newfoundland has had no Ireland in America 
to help her. She has been among the most loyal of Eng- 
land's colonies, and because of her loyalty she has been the 
most shamefully treated. 

It might be expected that Irish Catholics would emigrate 
in large numbers to Newfoundland to escape the infamous 
penal laws by which King George oppressed them in Ire- 
land, and that sailors from all parts of Great Britain would 
seek there a shelter from the press-gangs at home. Dr. 
O'Donnell, the first regularly authorized Catholic priest on 
the island, applied in 1790 for leave to build a chapel in an 
outport ; and, the Tories being in power, Governor Milbanke 
replied: "The Governor acquaints Mr. O'Donnell [omitting 
the title of Rev.] that, so far from being disposed to allow 
of an increase of places of religious worship for the Roman 
Catholics of the island, he very seriously intends next year 
to lay those established already under particular restrictions. 
Mr. O'Donnell must be aware that it is not the interest of 
Great Britain to encourage people to winter in Newfound- 
land ; and he cannot be ignorant that many of the lower 
order who would now stay would, if it were not for the con- 
venience with which they obtain absolution here, go home 



28 CATHOLIC LOYALTY 

for it, at least once in two or three years. And the Governor 
has been misinformed, if Mr. O'Donnell, instead of advising 
his hearers to return to Ireland, does not rather encourage 
them to winter in this country. On board the ' Salisbury,' 
Nov. 2, lygo." 

Do we need clearer proofs than that to show us who is 
responsible for the misery both of Newfoundland and of 
Ireland ? This Catholic priest, to whom the Tory governor 
refuses both his religious rights and the titles given him by 
his church and university, knew how to return good for evil. 

In 1800 a mutinous plot was concocted among the soldiers 
of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment to desert with their 
arms, and, being joined by their friends outside, to plunder 
St. John's, and afterwards escape to the United States. 
Fortunately, Dr. O'Donnell, who had meanwhile become 
bishop of St. John's, discovered the plot, and not only 
warned the commanding officer, but exerted all his own 
influence among the Catholics of the town to prevent an 
outbreak. 

The British government gave him the miserable pension 
of ;^5o a year, while they pay one of ^6,000 a year to 
the Duke of Richmond, for no better reason than that he 
was descended from the bastard son of that Louise de la 
Querouaille who was the French mistress of King Charles II. 

Chief Justice Reeves had been sent out from England 
to report on the condition of the country; and his " History 
of the Government of Newfoundland " shows that the 
ascendency so long maintained by a mercantile monopoly 
for narrow and selfish purpose had prevented the settlement 
of the country, the development of its resources, and the 
establishment of a proper system for the administration of 
government. Soon afterwards, in 1796, Admiral Walde- 
grave was appointed governor. The merchants of Burin 
complained to him that some of their fishermen wanted to 
emigrate to Nova Scotia. The merchants desired to pre- 
vent this. 



OPPRESSION OF SETTLERS 29 

Admiral Waldegrave reported thereon : " Unless these 
poor wretches emigrate, they must starve ; for how can it 
be otherwise, while the mercha'nt has the power of setting 
his own price on the supplies issued to the fishermen and 
on the fish that the people catch for him ? Thus we see a 
set of unfortunate beings worked like slaves, and hazarding 
their lives, when at the expiration of their term {however 
successful their exertions^ they find themselves not only with- 
out gain, but so deeply indebted as forces them to emigrate 
or drive them to despair." He further relates how the 
merchants refused to allow a tax of sixpence per gallon on 
rum, to help them to defray administrative expenses ; and 
he describes the merchants as " opposed to every measure 
of government which a governor may think proper to pro- 
pose for the general benefit of the island." 

But even this Governor Waldegrave, though he so clearly 
saw the true cause of the evil, sternly refused the only 
remedy within reach, which was to grant the poor wretches 
the right to use the waste, uncultivated land which existed 
in so great abundance round about them. 

He was so far from doing this that, when about to leave, 
he put on record, in 1799, for the use of his successor, that 
he had made no promise of any grant of land, save one to 
the officer commanding the troops, and that was not to 
be held by any other person. That is the way in which 
Britain's Tories have qared for her colonies. 

Hatton and Harvey say: "In many of the smaller and 
more remote settlements successive generations lived and 
died without education and religious teaching of any kind. 
The lives of the people were rendered hard and misera- 
ble for the express purpose of driving them away. The 
governors of those days considered that loyalty to England 
rendered it imperative on them to depopulate Newfound- 
land." 

How did England stand meanwhile towards the other 
nation, that of France, which had claims on Newfoundland ? 



3° 



THE TORIES AND FRANCE 



This country had exercised its right to replace the Bourbons 
by the republic, just as England had replaced the Stuarts 
by the Guelphs. 

But the Germans and Austrians had insolently interfered 
in the private affairs of France, and so made a military 
leader, in the person of Napoleon Bonaparte, absolutely 
indispensable for the protection of the country against 
foreign foes. 

No sooner was Napoleon seated on the consular throne- — 
he had not then become emperor — than he addressed a 
letter to King George III., urging the restoration of peace. 
"The war which has ravaged for eight years the four 
quarters of the globe, is it," he asks, "to be eternal.'"' 
"France and England," he concludes, "may, by the abuse 
of their strength, still for a time retard the period of their 
exhaustion ; but I will venture to say the fate of all civilized 
nations is attached to the termination of a war which in- 
volves the whole world." 

And what did England's Tory king answer ? He in- 
trusted the reply to Grenville, who was then the British 
minister for foreign affairs, and wrote to the Consul Bona- 
parte that, while his Britannic Majesty did not positively 
make the restoration of the Bourbons an indispensable con- 
dition of peace, nor claim to prescribe to France her form 
of government, he would intimate that only the one was 
likely to secure the other, and that he had not sufficient 
respect for her new ruler to entertain his proposals. Can 
we wonder that after so insolent a letter the first consul 
became emperor ? 

France is quite as proud as England ; and the insolence 
of the Guelph, in presuming to insinuate that her first 
consul was not as good as he, was quite enough to provoke 
her into making the consul her emperor, and doing her best 
to chastise her insulters. Charles James Fox, in Parlia- 
ment, pronounced the royal answer "odiously and absurdly 
wrong" ; but the squires and borough-mongers of the House 



THE DUKE OF YORK AND HIS MISIRESS 31 

of Commons supported the action of the king by a majority 
of 265 to 64. It is for such infamies as this that New- 
foundland has even to-day to bear all the inconveniences 
of the French claims on their shores. I do not blame the 
French for insisting that England shall scuttle out of Egypt 
before she yields her claims in Newfoundland ; but it is the 
responsible English, and not the innocent Newfoundlanders, 
who ought to pay the cost, and the conduct of England in 
insisting that Newfoundland shall bear the burden is 
cowardly and mean beyond all expression. 

While the Tories were thus hurling England into war, it 
is interesting to observe how the Guelphs conducted it. 
The Duke of York, with a generalship worthy of his family, 
led an army of British and Russian soldiers into a captivity 
from which they could only be redeemed by the surrender 
of prisoners taken on the sea by real Englishmen. 

Englishmen were taxed in order to give the German 
despots money wherewith to fight the French. Austria re- 
ceived for one campaign more money than England had to 
pay even for the '' Alabama " claims, and the czar of Russia 
received ;^9oo,ooo for the eight months his troops were 
in the field. During the same war the king's second 
son, the same Duke of York who had given so characteristic 
a sample of Guelph generalship in leading his forces to 
defeat, gave an equally characteristic specimen of Guelph 
morality. He had for mistress one Mary Ann Clarke, a 
w^oman of low origin, who transferred her intimacy to a 
Colonel Wardle, and confided to him many of the secrets 
of her relations to the royal duke. Wardle, on Jan. 27, 
1809, affirmed in the House of Commons that the Duke of 
York had permitted Mrs. Clarke to carry on a trafiic in 
commissions and promotions, and demanded a public 
inquiry. Mrs. Clarke was examined at the bar of the 
House of Commons for several weeks, displaying a shame- 
less, witty impudence that drew continual applause and 
laughter from a mob of English gmtlcmen, many of whom 



32 



THE DUKE t)F YORK AS A CHURCHMAN 



knew her too well. The charges were proved, and the 
Duke of York resigned his position as commander-in-chief ; 
and the disclosures made — doctors of divinity suing for 
bishoprics, and priests for preferment, at the feet of a 
harlot, kissing her palm with coin — may teach Englishmen 
Avhat they have to guard against even to-day on the part 
of that Tory party that has religion, conscience, and mo- 
rality much more on its lips than in its heart. 

It is not altogether irrelevant in this connection to 
mention that in 1825, when the Catholic relief bill had 
passed the House of Commons by 268 votes against 241, 
the Duke of York opposed the repeal of the Catholic dis- 
abilities by the common Tory appeal to what they call 
conscience, saying " these were the principles to which he 
would adhere, and which he would maintain and act up to, 
to the latest moment of his life existence, whatever might 
be his situation in life, so help him God^ 

England has indeed had to pay dearly for her hereditary 
monarchy, and for the awful hypocrisy which permits the 
appeal to God by such State Churchmen as the Duke of 
York to have any effect on politics. I need hardly say that 
the House of Lords did with the Catholic Emancipation 
Bill what it has lately done with the House of Commons 
Bill for Home Rule in Ireland, and threw it out. 

While England was fighting France, she had also to fight 
the United States. It is an episode of which neither 
country has any reason to be proud. The New Englanders 
were mostly opposed to the declaration of war. The aver- 
age Englishman knows Httle about it. He is taught by his 
history books that the victory of the " Shannon " over the 
" Chesapeake " destroyed the prestige of the American 
navy ; and he is wrong even in that. 

The " Shannon " had a brave and able commander, and 
had been many weeks at sea, so that Captain Broke had 
been able to train his men thoroughly, and, above all things, 
to prevent them from getting drunk. 



TREATY OF 1815 33 

Captain Lawrence had to engage many men who had 
never been on a war-vessel before, and did not know how 
to work the guns. Many of the sailors had bottles of rum 
in their pockets, and were too drunk to stand when their 
ship got within fighting distance of the " Shannon." 

I wish our present Secretary of the Navy would learn the 
lesson, and now, when the need of the Newfoundlanders is 
so great, and when we require sober men to man our navy, 
^ive the brave fishermen of that island every reasonable in- 
ducement to enlist in our service. 

The war closed unsatisfactorily, by the mediation of the 
Emperor Alexander of Russia ; and the Treaty of Ghent 
left England mistress of the seas. 

The treaties of 1814 and 18 15 gave England another 
opportunity for relieving Newfoundland from the French 
control of her shore ; but the Tories were at the helm, and 
became fellow-conspirators with other tyrants of Europe in 
perpetrating the most monstrous wrong and the completest 
restoration of despotism that was conceivable, in Germany, 
Austria, Italy, Spain, everywhere. 

They insulted France by imposing upon her the rule of a 
Bourbon, and to this Bourbon they guaranteed those rights 
over Newfoundland on which the French republic bases its 
claims to-day. 

Let us now turn to Newfoundland itself. While the 
nations were fighting, its merchants had enjoyed the monop- 
oly of the cod-fisheries. Some of the capitalists had secured 
profits between ;{J'2o,ooo and ^40,000 a year each, but 
they made the poor fishermen pay eight pounds a barrel for 
flour and twelve pounds a barrel for pork. They took their 
fortunes to England. No effort was made to open up roads 
or extend agriculture ; for, if it had been done, the landlords 
of England wou'.d not have been able to sell their pork and 
wheat at such exorbitant prices there. 

So, when the war ceased and other nations were enabled 
to compete in the fisheries, the colony had to pass through 



34 SUFFERING IN THE COLONY 

some years of disaster and suffering, while the merchants 
were spending their exorbitant profits in England. 

The planters and fishermen had been in the habit of leav- 
ing their savings in the hands of the St. John's merchants. 
Many of these failed, and the hardly won money of the 
fishermen was swept away by the insolvency of their bankers. 
It is estimated that the working class lost a sum little short 
of ;^4oo,ooo sterling. 

Now, eighty years later, we have another instance of the 
same misfortunes, proceeding from the same cause, — the fact 
that the money made by the fishery has been taken off to 
England ; that the banks, which are altogether in the hands 
of the mercantile, or English, party, have been unfaithful to 
their trust ; and that the fishermen who hold the bankers' 
notes get, from the one bank, 80 cents, and, from the other, 
only 20 cents on the dollar. 

The merchants applied for aid to the British government ; 
and in June, 18 17, a committee of the House of Commons 
met. The merchants had only two remedies to propose. 
One was the granting of a bounty, to enable them to com- 
pete with the French and the Americans, who were sus- 
tained by bounties ; but, although England was a protection- 
ist country at that time, it gave only bounties in favor of rich 
men, and not of the poor. The other was the deportation of 
the principal part of the inhabitants, now numbering 70,000, 
to the neighboring colonies. 

The honest, sensible, easy plan, that of opening up the 
land to cultivation, so that the starving people might be able 
to grow their own food and breed their own cattle, was the 
one thing that these so-called practical Englishmen would 
not permit, because it might interfere with the profits of the 
British land-owner and merchant. 

At that very time the local authorities of Massachusetts 
were giving a bounty for each Newfoundland fisherman 
brought into the State. 

When Sir Thomas Cochrane was made governor in 1825, 



MERCHANT AND LANDLORD 



35 



his government made the first road in the island. For one 
hundred and forty-five years England had been master of 
the island, and not a single road had been built suitable for 
wheeled carriages. Is it conceivable that the French would 
so completely have neglected the colony if they had been its 
masters ? 

In 1832, when the Reform Bill put an end to the malign 
influence of Tory ascendency in England, Newfoundland 
also gained the boon of representative government ; but 
it was only a merchants' government. The people who 
elected the House of Assembly did not dare to vote against 
the will of the merchants for fear of losing employment; 
and, while their representatives had the power of debating, 
passing measures, and voting moneys, the Council, which 
was composed of nominees of the crown, selected exclu- 
sively from the merchant class, could throw out all their 
measures, and were irresponsible to the people. 

In England King George IV. had rendered only one service 
to the people, — he had brought royalty into contempt, and 
so strengthened the feeling which resulted in the passage of 
many necessary measures which his father and brothers 
had opposed. But the selfish interests of the merchants 
and land-owners of England were still in the way of many 
reforms. Benjamin Disraeli, who did his worst to prevent 
the starving people from having cheap bread, became the 
flunkey and afterward the master of the Tory squires ; and 
it was not until thousands had died of famine in Ireland 
that the selfish land-owners agreed to that reduction of duty 
on grain which made free trade so popular in England. 

Now, by a wise colonization policy, the government might 
have helped both Ireland and Newfoundland. 

By passing a law to the effect that, so long as the French 
gave a bounty on the export of salt fish, the English gov- 
ernment would give their own fishermen exactly the same 
amount of protection, the French would soon have been 
brought to terms ; and, by opening up Newfoundland to 



36 OPIUM WAR IN CHINA 

settlement by roads and railways, many of the starving Irish 
would have been provided with homes under the British flag 
far more comfortable than any that they could find in their 
native land. So a more prosperous Ireland would have 
risen on this side of the Atlantic, and England would have 
gained thereby. The Irish and the Catholic were really 
quite as loyal to the empire as any others. The difference 
was that the English High Churchman and the Scotch Pres- 
byterian got all the privileges ; and the Irishman and the 
Catholic were taught by the action of the British government 
that insurrection was tlieir only hope of getting simple jus- 
tice. 

India, China, Newfoundland, Ireland, were simply sweaters' 
dens for the profit of England and Scotland. 

Just as in Newfoundland the British merchant insisted on 
lieeping out every trace of free trade that would enable the 
poor fisherman to sell his fish in the highest market and 
buy his provisions in the lowest, so in China the British 
in 1838 insisted on forcing the Chinaman to buy the poison- 
ous opium of India, although in 1834 the China government 
had warned the British of their intention to prohibit the 
infamous traffic. The war that England thereupon pro- 
claimed against China was one of the most infamous and 
cowardly of the century, and made British Christianity more 
hateful even than its opium to the rulers of the Celestial 
Empire. ;^4,375,ooo was extorted from the Chinese em- 
peror for the expenses of the war ($20,000,000), and 
;^i,25o,ooo ($5,000,000) for the opium which, with perfect 
justice, he had confiscated from the smugglers. The mob 
of London cheered the wagons which brought the ill-gotten 
treasure through the streets ; and the mob in Parliament 
thanked the officers who had murdered the helpless and 
unoffending Chinese, while the parsons congratulated the 
people on the opening of China to British commerce, British 
civilization, and British religion. 

The brutalizing influence of this method of carrying on 



SIR JOHN EOWRING's WAR 37 

the foreign trade of England was shown by a later alto- 
gether unnecessary war with China about the Lorcha 
"Arrow." This was a Chinese pirate vessel, which had ob- 
tained, by false pretences, the temporary possession of 
the British flag. On Oct. 8, 1856, the Chinese police 
boarded it in the Canton River, and took off twelve China- 
men on a charge of piracy. This they had a perfect right 
to do ; but the British consul, Mr. Parkes, instead of thank- 
ing them, demanded the instant restoration of men who had 
been flying a British flag under false pretences. He ap- 
plied to Sir John Bowring, the British plenipotentiary at 
Hong Kong, for assistance. Sir John was an able and 
experienced man. He had been editor of the Westminster 
Review, had a bowing, if not a speaking acquaintance with 
a dozen languages, had been one of the leaders of the free 
trade party, and had a thorough acquaintance with the 
Chinese trade. For many years he had been secretary of 
the Peace Society. 

He was the author of several hymns. In fact, an Amer- 
ican hymn-book contains not less than seventeen from his 
pen. One of them, found in most modern hymn-books, was 
that commencing, — 

" In the cross of Christ I glory"; 

and its author proceeded to glory in the cross of the Prince 
of Peace by making war on the Chinese, although the gov- 
ernor, Yeh, had sent back all the men whose return was 
demanded by Mr. Parkes. 

Mr. Justin McCarthy, in his " History of our own Times," 
says, " During the whole business Sir John Bowring con- 
trived to keep himself almost invariably in the wrong ; and, 
even where his claim happened to be in itself good, he 
managed to assert it in a manner at once untimely, impru- 
dent, and indecent." 

One of the highest legal authorities in England, Lord 
Lyndhurst, declared Sir John Bowring's action, and that of 



38 CHURCH VERSUS CHRISTIANITY 

the British authorities who aided him, to be unjustifiable on 
any principle either of law or reason ; and Mr. Cobden, 
himself an old friend of Sir John Bowring, moved in the 
House of Commons that " the papers which have been laid 
upon the table fail to establish satisfactory grounds for the 
violent measures resorted to at Canton in the late affair of 
the ' Arrow.' " 

Nearly all the best men in the House of Commons — Glad- 
stone, Roundell Palmer, Sydney Herbert, Milner Gibson, 
Sir Frederick Thesiger, as well as many of the chief Tories — 
supported Mr. Cobden ; and the vote of censure was carried 
against Lord Palmerston's government by 263 to 247. But 
Lord Palmerston, then the hero of the Evangelical Church 
party, — "Palmerston, the true Protestant," "Palmerston, 
the only Christian Prime Minister," — knew exactly the 
strength of British Christianity when it interfered with the 
sale of British beer, or Indian opium, or Manchester cotton, 
and appealed to the shop-keeper instincts of the British 
people. He dissolved Parliament ; and Cobden, Bright, 
Milner Gibson, W. J. Fox, Layard, and many others were 
left without seats. Manchester rejected John Bright be- 
cause he had spoken in the interests of peace and honor, 
and condemned one of the most cowardly, brutal, and un- 
provoked wars of the century. 

We see the same cause at work in Ireland. One British 
bishop, Dr. Thirlwall, of St. David's, had the manliness to 
favor Mr. Gladstone's bill for the disestablishment of the 
Irish Church ; but most of them acted in this matter in 
direct opposition to the teachings of Him whom they pro- 
fess to worship as their God. Mr. John Bright warned the 
Lords that, by throwing themselves athwart the national 
course, they might meet with "accidents not pleasant to 
think of"; and there is no doubt that the warning had its 
effect. And even now I do not think that the people of 
Ireland will ever get from the House of Lords that measure 
of right which even the House of Commons has unwillingly 



A LOST OPPORTUNITY 



39 



and grudgingly accorded to them, unless the Irishmen of 
America come to their aid in a more effective manner than 
they have ever yet done. 

Newfoundland, unlike Ireland, has few friends in the 
United States, and therefore is wholly at England's mercy. 
What it suffered in the past I have already told. Let us 
see how England has treated it in the last few years. 

It was from Lord Palmerston, of all men, that the New- 
foundlander might hope for redress. 

He had said in the Don Pacifico case, "As the Roman 
in the days of old held himself free from indignity when he 
could say, ' Civis Romanus sum,' so also a British subject, 
in whatever land he be, shall feel confident that the watch- 
ful eye and the strong arm of England shall protect him 
against injustice and wrong." 

Surely, the 200,000 Newfoundlanders had more right to 
expect that Lord Palmerston would maintain this principle 
in their defence than the extortionate Portuguese Jew or the 
Chinese pirates who were taken from the Lorcha "Arrow."' 

And Lord Palmerston had the best opportunity of helping 
the Newfoundlander; for he was the intimate friend of 
Louis Napoleon and Persigny. By his approbation of Louis 
Napoleon's coup d'etat he became the creator of the Anglo- 
French Alliance ; and, since this alliance was a matter of 
life and death to the Second Empire, he might have used 
the opportunity, after the Crimean War, of exercising such 
pressure upon Louis Napoleon as to secure justice to New- 
foundland. 

But he neglected it, and thereby he lost the opportunity 
of strengthening the position of England and Canada 
towards the United States at the time of the " Trent " and 
"Alabama" affairs. 

We may be glad of this ; but, from a British point of view, 
it was not merely an injustice to Newfoundland, but also a 
political blunder. 

One would suppose that, simply as a matter of imperial 



40 FIRST RA.ILROAD PROJECT 

policy, the British government would long ago have built 
a railroad across this island, in order to have the quickest 
possible connection with its Canadian dependency. The 
Fenian raids into Canada, the Confederate raids from 
Canada, the Red River Rebellion, the possibility of war 
arising from the " Trent " incident, the necessity of securing 
a rapid means of communication with the Pacific, should 
all, on purely strategic grounds, have induced the British 
government to establish a safe naval station in some south- 
ern harbor of Newfoundland, with a railroad communication 
to the west shores of the island. 

But the government left the Newfoundlanders, impover- 
ished by the consequences of British misrule, to take the 
initiative; and it was not until 1878 that they were able to 
do anything. Then the Hon. William V. Whiteway induced 
the Newfoundland government to offer an annual subsidy 
of $120,000 per annum and liberal grants of crown lands to 
any company which would construct and operate a railway 
across Newfoundland, connecting by steamers with Britain 
or Ireland on the one hand, and the Intercolonial and Cana- 
dian lines on the other. Of the immense advantage of such 
a line to Great Britain, constructed as it would be at the 
expense of Newfoundland, I need hardly speak, and every 
patriotic ministry would have greeted the proposal with en- 
thusiasm ; but, most unfortunately both for England and 
for Newfoundland, the Premier was Mr. Disraeli, and the 
P'oreign Secretary Lord Salisbury. What Lord Salisbury 
was may be learned from Mr. James G. Blaine's account of 
his speeches and conduct as Lord Robert Cecil in 1862. 
I know of no sermon preached within the last thirty years 
that inculcates a more necessary moral and religious lesson 
for Lords and .Commons and parsons of England than that 
taught in the twentieth chapter of the Hon. James G. 
Blaine's "Twenty Years of Congress." From it we may 
learn, first of all, that the right of secession of Ireland or 
Newfoundland from the British empire is already virtually 



BRITISH ENEMIES OF UNITED STATES 41 

conceded by many of the Tory leaders of England. Mr. 
Blaine gives us in that chapter a list of twenty-four members 
of the British House of Commons, ten members of the 
British Peerage, one admiral, one vice-admiral, one cap- 
tain, one colonel, one lieutenant colonel, and a host of 
knights and baronets who subscribed money to the Con- 
federate Cotton Loan, while he gives extracts from the 
speeches of Bernal Osborne, Lord John Russell, Lord 
Palmerston, Mr. Gregory, M.P., Mr. G. W. Bentinck, M.P., 
Lord Robert Cecil, now Marquis of Salisbury, M. Lindsy, 
M.P., Lord Campbell, Earl Malmesbury, Mr. Laird, M.P. 
(the builder of the "Alabama" and the rebel rams), Mr. 
Horsman, M.P. for Stroud, the Marquis of Clanricarde 
(a name familiar to all Irishmen from its connection with 
the evictions), Mr. Peacocke, M.P., Mr. Clifforde, M.P., Mr. 
Haliburton, M.P., Lord Robert Montague, Sir James Fer- 
guson, the Earl of Donoughmore, Mr. Alderman Rose, Lord 
Brougham, and the Right Hon. William Ewart Gladstone, 
Chancellor of the Exchequer, breathing hostility to the 
cause of the Union States and friendship for the slave- 
holder ; while the few honest men in the House of Com- 
mons, who, like John Bright, Foster, Charles Villiers, Milner 
Gibson, and Cobden, spoke for the cause of the North, 
were reviled, not alone by their colleagues, but even by 
many of their constituents, because they defended the side 
of liberty, truth, and justice. 

Why should we withhold from the just cause of Ireland 
and Newfoundland the sympathy which England gave to 
the secessionist slaveholder ? 

Of course the London Times was on the slaveholder's 
side. On the last day of December, 1864, it said that "Mr. 
Seward and other teachers and flatterers of the multitude 
still affect to anticipate the early restoration of the Union" ; 
and in three months from that date the rebels were con- 
quered. 

It was on March 7, 1862, that Lord Robert Cecil said in 



42 THE SALISBURY-BEACONSFIELD CABINET 

Parliament : " The plain fact is that the Northern States of 
America can never be our sure friends, because we are 
rivals politically, rivals commercially, We aspire to the 
same position. We both aspire to the government of the 
seas. We are both manufacturing people, and in every 
port as well as at every court we are rivals of each other. 
. . . With the Southern States the case is entirely reversed. 
The people are an agricultural people. They furnish the 
raw material of our industry, and they consume the prod- 
ucts which we make from it. With them, therefore, every 
interest must lead us to cultivate friendly relations; and 
we have seen that, when the war began, they at once re- 
curred to England as their natural ally." 

It was easy enough for the most cowardly man, in Lord 
Robert Cecil's position, to use such words, even were he 
naught more than a lath painted over to imitate steel. 
Even if England is ruined, he is safe. But it was quite 
another matter when, sixteen years later, the poor New- 
foundlander applied to him and Disraeli-Beaconsfield for 
the right to build a railroad. 

Russia had just declared her intention of demolishing the 
last unpleasant clause in the treaty forced upon her by 
France and England at the close of the Crimean War; and 
Russia was a more dangerous foe than the Northern States. 
And the story of the Beaconsfield- Salisbury connection with 
that affair excited the laughter of all other diplomatists in 
Europe. 

They pretended to have brought peace with honor from 
the Conference of Berlin. But what did the rest of Europe 
think about it.'' 

It made the Christian populations of the South believe 
that Russia was their especial friend, and their enemies were 
England and the unspeakable Turk; it strengthened among 
the Greeks the impression already made by Palmerston's 
action in the Don Pacifico case, — that France was their 
friend, and England their enemy; and it created everywhere 



VETO CONSTRUCTION OF RAILROAD 43 

the impression that the Congress was a theatrical piece of 
business, merely enacted as a pageant on the Berlin stage. 
England has not yet paid the full penalty of her stupid 
acquiescence in the rule of Disraeli and Salisbury; and it 
will cost her yet far more than she paid for the results of 
Tory infamy and Whig senility in the " Alabama " business, 
for she has enemies to deal with who are far less generous 
and far slyer than the people of the United States. It was 
under the Beaconsfield-Salisbury cabinet that Sir Bartle 
Frere made that infamous declaration of war against Cete- 
wayo which led to the defeat of Lord Chelmsford's British 
troops by a lot of half-naked savages. It was under this 
ministry that the stupid expedition to Afghanistan led to 
the massacre of Sir Louis Cavagnari and the members of 
his staff. It was under this ministry that the soul-stirring 
anthem of Thompson, 

" When Britain first at Heaven's command," 

was superseded by the rant of the Tory street-walker, — 

" We don't want to fight ; 
But, by jingo, if we do, 
We've got the ships, we've got the men, 
We've got the money, too," 

And the manner in which the government used the ships, 
the men, and the money, proved that there was one thing 
needful which the Jingoes had not got; and that is man- 
hood. 

To this Jingo ministry it was, then, that Sir William V. 
Whiteway had to apply for the imperial sanction to the rail- 
way ; and sanction was refused. For what reason ? The/r^- 
te7ided reason was that the western terminus of the line at 
Bay St. George would be on that part of the coast 
affected by the French treaty rights. It may be open to 
doubt whether the French claims which interfered with the 
establishment of a railroad terminus at Bay St. George 



44 



MOTIVES FOR VETO 



were just or not ; but there is not the slightest doubt that 
Lord Palmerston, in his note of July lo, 1838, to Count 
Sebastian!, had maintained that they were not justified, and 
that the Tories were and are of the same opinion. 

But when a whole colony of Englishmen were wronged 
according to the statements both of Palmerston and Salis- 
bury, the Beaconsfield-Salisbury administration dare not 
maintain the rights of these Englishmen against the French. 
That is the courage and the bravery of British Jingoism, 
which bullies weak China and little Greece in support of a 
Sir John Bowring or a Don Pacifico, but dares not maintain 
an Englishman's rights against the French republic. 

The question might easily have been settled without 
offending France by making Port aux Basques, which is 
less than eighty miles south-west of Bay St. George and 
beyond the French treaty limits, the terminus of the line. 

There must, then, have been some concealed reason 
behind the pretended one. It is absolutely certain that 
there were two influences at work in London which were 
directly antagonistic to the true interest both of Great 
Britain and Newfoundland. One was that of the Canadian 
party, who are determined to boycott every scheme that 
would make any Newfoundland port a rival of Halifax. 
The other is the British, or mercantile, party, who for two 
hundred years past have consistently and successfully op- 
posed the introduction of any industry into the island that 
would enable the fishermen to escape from their present 
bondage. 

If either Beaconsfield or Salisbury had really cared for 
England's interests, they must have foreseen that, even if 
they were willing to sacrifice Newfoundland, the position 
they took in this matter must in the highest degree be 
damaging to the European prestige of Great Britain. 
When republican France was threatened by all the tyrants 
of Europe, the terrible Danton said, " II nous faut de 
I'audace, et encore de I'audace, et toujours de I'audace." 



"YANKEE swindlers" 45 

To-day the Frenchman requires no Danton to teach him the 
lesson ; for the extraordinary confession of weakness made 
by the Jingo government of 1878 in refusing to sanction a 
Hne that could have been built without touching the French 
shore question at all was a direct encouragement to the 
French to persevere in that policy which they have since so 
successfully pursued in Madagascar, in Siam, in Africa, 
and in Newfoundland. 

No matter whether the French claims in Newfoundland 
be right or wrong, the Beaconsfield-Salisbury government 
have practically surrendered the matter ; and the only thing 
left for the British government is to compensate Newfound- 
land for its loss, as America was compensated for the " Ala- 
bama " damages. But they will not do it. 

Mr. Whiteway had to find another means of helping 
the colony. He was obliged to choose between two al- 
ternatives, — either to build no railway at all or only one 
which would avoid the very districts which, for the benefit 
of the settler, ought to be opened for settlement. 

So the line to Harbor Grace was built. But even this 
the wealthy British did not build. It was left to an Ameri- 
can syndicate. P. T. McG., writing of this line to the New 
York Weekly Post oi Jan. 2, 1895, says, "The contract was 
given to an enterprising Yankee, who built a few miles, 
swindled the shareholders, fleeced the colony, and then 
decamped, leaving as a legacy an unfinished road, an in- 
terminable lawsuit, and a damaged colonial credit." 

I happen to know another side of the question ; and it 
does not become the Englishmen interested in that railway 
matter to talk of "Yankee swindlers." 

When Sir Robert Thorburn became Premier of New- 
foundland, he took the first step necessary to make this line 
of some value to the tax-payers by extending it twenty-seven 
miles to Placentia, the old French " La Plaisance." This 
line was of immense value to St. John's, because it gave the 
people of that city a convenient winter harbor which is 



46 LOBSTER C,)UESTION 

always open, by which they have an easy communication 
with Canada and the United States ; and I hope the time 
will soon come when we shall have steamers running from 
Boston, touching at the French Island of St. Pierre, and 
then going to Placentia. 

What were the English diplomatists doing meanwhile ? 
In 1890 they were arranging a modus vivendi with the 
French government about the lobster fisheries. The Tories 
were in power, and Sir James Ferguson was the Under- 
secretary of State. This gentleman's sentiments towards 
the United States have been recorded by the Hon. James G. 
Blaine. In his "Twenty Years of Congress," Vol, II., 
page 481, foot-note, he writes: Sir James Ferguson de- 
clared in the House of Commons, March 14, 1864, that 
" wholesale peculations and robberies have been perpetrated 
under the form of war by the generals of the Federal States ; 
and worse horrors than, I believe, have ever in the present 
century disgraced European armies have been perpetrated 
under the eyes of the Federal government, and yet remain 
unpunished. These things are as notorious as the proceed- 
ings of a government which seems anxious to rival one 
despotic and irresponsible power of Europe in its contempt 
for the public opinion of mankind." These words need no 
commentary to-day. They show us pretty clearly the char- 
acter of the man who then spoke them, and will prepare us 
for his treatment of the Newfoundland question. On March 
20, 1890, he made the following statement in the House of 
Commons : — 

"The Newfoundland government was consulted as to 
the terms of the modus vivendi, which was itwdified to some 
extent to meet their views ; but it was necessary to conclude 
it without referring it to them in its final shape." 

Five days later the Governor of Newfoundland tele- 
graphed to the Secretary of State : — 

" My ministers request that incorrect statement made by 
Under-Secretary of State for foreign affairs be immediately 



GOVERNOR DES VtEUX's PROPOSITION 47 

contradicted, as the terms of modus viveiidi were not modified 
in accordance with their views. Ministers protested against 
any claims of French, and desired time to be changed till 
January for reasons given ; but that was ignored, and modus 
Vivendi entered into without regard to their wishes. Minis- 
ters much embarrassed by incorrect statement made by 
Under-Secretary of State." 

Of course the Secretary of State supported the statement 
of Sir James Ferguson, and refused to correct it. But 
on page 54 of the case for the colony, published June, 1890, 
we find the words : — 

" Two facts are placed beyond dispute by the above- 
quoted correspondence: (i) that the consent of the 
• community ' of Newfoundland to the modus vivendi was 
not obtained by laying it before the legislature, which the 
' Labouchere ' despatch declared to be the proper action to 
be taken in such cases ; (2) and that even the government 
of Newfoundland was not consulted as to the adoption of 
the modus vivendi as settled." 

The Labouchere despatch alluded to above, and called 
by the Newfoundlanders their " Magna Charta," had been 
sent by the Right Hon. Henry Labouchere on March 
26, 1857. But Mr. Labouchere was not a Tory; and 
there is the whole difference. So Newfoundland still has 
to suffer for the criminal negligence which British Tories 
have displayed from 17 13 until to-day. 

There was one Englishman, and that the Governor of 
Newfoundland itself, who had a clear and honorable notion 
of the imperial government's duty to its unfortunate colony. 
Sir G. William des Voeux, writing from the government 
House, St. John's, Jan. 14, 1887, to the Colonial Office 
in London, after reciting the circumstances, says : " If this 
be so, as indeed there are other reasons for believing, I 
would respectfully urge that in fairness the heavy resulting 
loss should not, or, at all events, not exclusively, fall upon 
this colony, and that if in the national interest a right is to 



48 BOUNTY AND RAILROAD 

be withheld from Newfoundland which naturally belongs to 
it, and the possession of which makes to it all the difference 
between wealth and penury, there is involved on the part of 
the nation a corresponding obligation to grant compensation 
of a value equal or nearly equal to that of the right with- 
held." 

Nothing can be fairer than that, and it is written by the 
trusted ofBcial of the British government. 

Sir G. William des Vceux continues, " In conclusion, I 
would respectfully express on behalf of this suffering 
colony the earnest hope that the vital interests of 200,000 
British subjects will not be disregarded out of deference 
to the susceptibilities of any foreign power," etc. 

The best interests of those 200,000 inhabitants can be 
served without touching the French shore at all. Even if 
France concedes all that Newfoundland demands, the bounty 
question is in the way ; and Newfoundland cannot compete 
with that. 

France gives this bounty — and quite rightly — as a pro- 
tection to her sailors. A similar protection to England's 
fishermen would not be permitted by the Manchester men. 

The other way is to build a railroad connecting the min- 
ing and agricultural districts along the French shore with 
Port aux Basques. Of course I do not mean such railroads 
as are built in England. They have been taxed to the ex- 
tent of more than seventy millions of pounds sterling over 
and above the real value of the land sold to them by the 
rapacious land monopolists. They have been taxed to the 
extent of many millions more for legal expenses, which, if 
the House of Commons were equal to its duties, could have 
been saved. They have been taxed in many cases to find 
sinecure berths for the dependants of rich men ; and so, in 
order to pay a fair dividend to their stockholders, they must 
reduce wages to the lowest point, and screw the utmost 
penny out of their customers. 

It is, then, the American way which I recommend as a 



NORTHERN AND WESTERN RAILROAD 



49 



model, and which the Newfoundland government have tried 
to imitate in their contract with Mr, Reid, of Montreal. 
They could have made a far more advantageous contract 
with him if England had done her duty ; but neither Mr. 
Reid nor Newfoundland is to be blamed for England's 
fault. 

The contract signed on May i6, 1893, by Mr. R. G. 
Reid binds him to construct a line about five hundred miles 
in length, connecting Placentia Junction and the chief east- 
ern ports of Newfoundland with Port aux Basques, and to 
operate this line as well as the Placentia Branch Railway 
for a period of ten years, commencing Sept. i, 1893. 
After that the line is to become the property of the New- 
foundland government, and will be an interesting experi- 
ment in the State ownership of railroads. For every mile 
of single 42-inch gauge built by Mr. Reid he is to 
receive the sum of $15,600 in Newfoundland government 
bonds, bearing interest at 3-^ per cent., and eight square 
miles of land. The increase in rental value of this land 
will give a large revenue, even if the line should not pay 
its working expenses. 

The land grant for 500 miles of railroad would amount 
to 2,500,000 acres. If Newfoundland were one of the 
United States, capital enough would be subscribed to 
enable Mr. Reid to finish his contract in the allotted time ; 
but, as it is under England, and must therefore suffer from 
the awful burden of England's diplomatic incapacity, capital 
holds aloof from it. 

Where does British money go? The Tory of 1878 
sang,— 

" We don't want to fight ; 
But, by jingo, if we do, 
We've got the ships, we've got the men, 
We've got the money, too." 

It is interesting to see how that money, which is with- 
held from Britain's oldest colony, has been spent. 



50 HOW BRITISH MONEY IS LOST 

We will begin with Mr. Blaine's " Twenty Years of Con- 
gress." On page 479 he quotes Lord Campbell as saying 
in Parliament on March 23, 1863, "Swelling with omnipo- 
tence, Mr. lincoln and his colleagues dictate insurrection 
to the slaves of Alabama.'' (That fatal word, " Alabama" ! 
Will it ever cease to trouble the British conscience ?) 
And he spoke of the administration as " ready to let loose 
4,000,000 negroes on their compulsory owners, and to 
renew from sea to sea the horrors and crimes of San 
Domingo." Mr. Blaine says, further, that Lord Campbell 
argued earnestly in favor of the British government joining 
the government of France in acknowledging Southern inde- 
pendence. He boasted that within the last few days a 
Southern loan of ^3,000,000 sterling had been offered in 
London, and of that ^9,000,000, or three times the amount, 
had been subscribed. 

Here, then, we have a means of accounting for 
$15,000,000. Another $15,000,000 is accounted for by 
the money which America forced England to pay for the 
" Alabama " depredations. On that point Mr. Laird, the 
builder of the "Alabama," deserves to be immortalized. 
According to Mr. Blaine, on March 27, 1863, Mr. Laird 
was loudly cheered in the House of Commons when he 
declared that " the institutions of the United States are of 
no value whatever, and have reduced the name of liberty to 
an utter absurdity." 

Another large lump of Jingo money has gone into the 
Russian loan ; and, of this loan, $4,000,000 is coming to 
Bethlehem in Pennsylvania. O shade of John Roebuck, 
look back to the earth you have left, and see what your 
words have done for the armor plate manufacturers of 
your Sheffield constituency. While still among us in the 
flesh, you said on April 23, 1863, on some trouble: 
" It may lead to war ; and I, speaking for the EngUsh people, 
am prepared for war. I know that language will strike the 
heart of the peace party in this country, but it will also 



MR. ROEBUCK 



51 



Strike the heart of the insolent people who govern 
America." 

And on June 30, 1863, you said: "The South will never 
come into the Union ; and, what is more, I hope it never 
may. I will tell you why I say so. America while she was 
united ran a race of prosperity unparalleled in the world. 
Eighty years made the republic such a power that, if she 
had continued as she was a few years longer, she would have 
been the great bully of the world. 

"As far as my influence goes, I am determined to do all I 
can to prevent the reconstruction of the Union. ... I say, 
then, that the Southern States have indicated their right to 
recognition. They hold out to us advantages such as the 
world has never seen before. I hold that it will be of the 
greatest importance that the reconstruction of the Union 
should tiot take place." 

The United States have given England the war you 
hoped for, — not a war against soldiers and sailors, who, un- 
like those who followed Colonel Pepperell and Washington 
and Isaac Hull and Grant and De Grasse to victory, re- 
quire the protection of a contagious diseases act, but a war 
of protective tariffs. 

The State which gave its name to the pirate ship " Ala- 
bama " now votes for tariffs to exclude the iron, steel, and 
coal of England. Sheffield is in sackcloth and ashes be- 
cause Pennsylvania has taken away from her the Russian 
order for armor plates, and countless millions of British dol- 
lars are invested in American factories, giving high wages 
to tariff-protected American workmen instead of sweaters' 
wages to the beer-sodden lunatics who sing to your honor 
the Tory strain, — 

" By jingo, if we do, 
We've got the ships, we've got the men, 
We've got the money, too." 

In almost every case in which a British investor has lost 
his money in the United States it can be proved that some 



52 HOW BRITISH MONEV IS LOST 

British expert or financial agent earned a large sum by in- 
ducing liim to invest. 

At any rate, these immense investments in American rail- 
roads, loans, and lands, have one great advantage for the 
United States. They bind over England to keep the peace 
toward us. There is no more unpatriotic, no more unmoral, 
no more cowardly man than the British financial agent and 
money-lender. If only the security is good, he will rather 
lend money at 4g^ per cent, for the most devilish than at 4 
per cent, for the most divine purpose. It is due to the in- 
fluence of the money-lending class that England has so 
completely lost the grip of heart and brain on her imperial 
duties. 

It is said that John Bull pays a tax of $700,000,000 a 
year to the liquor interest, to say nothing of the indirect 
damages resulting from the fact that the liquor interest is 
the chief supporter of the brothel, the baccarat table, and 
the Tory Democracy. The beerage has proved of late 
years also a highway to the peerage ; and it has also served 
to deplete the pockets of a good many British fools, who 
were misled into the insane delusion that they could earn 
as much from the profits of American guzzling as from 
those of British beer-drinking. America has been infested 
for some time by a crowd of Englishmen, who came here 
hunting options on American breweries, which they sold at 
a high price to their English dupes. In one case some 
breweries, which cost the owners less than $2,000,000, 
were sold in England for $6,000,000, the Englishmen and 
Americans who managed the transaction making enormous 
profits at the expense of their dupes. 

On investigating the published accounts of some twelve 
American brewery companies in which Englishmen have 
been induced to invest more than $41,808,000, I find that 
the depreciation in selling price of shares, taking the high- 
est rates of November, 1894, was no less than $21,917,280, 
or 52.42 per cent, on the paid-up capital; and, taking the 



WHAT MIGHT BRITISH MONEY DO? 



53 



common stock alone, the loss exceeds over seventy per 
cent, on the paid-up capital. 

I am glad of it. The Englishman who, knowing the 
influence of this infernal traffic on his own countrymen, 
would make money by extending its curse to the United 
States, deserves to lose his money quite as much as the 
Tory investors in the Confederate Loan deserved their 
loss. Now suppose this $70,000,000 thus invested in 
"Alabama damages," Confederate Loan, and American 
breweries had been put into Newfoundland roads and 
railways, what would have been the result? An immense 
amount of traffic which now must pay toll to American 
railroads would have gone over purely British lines, all 
the way through British America to China and Japan. 
All the mining and agricultural lands of Newfoundland 
might have been developed. The French shore question 
would have ceased to occupy the diplomatic wiseacres, 
because the people would have found so much profit in 
other employments as to care nothing about French com- 
petition in the cod and lobster fishery. Newfoundland 
itself woidd have become an impregnable arsenal for the 
British navy, commanding the entrances to the St. Law- 
rence, and, in case of war with the United States, giving 
that navy the power of practically blockading all the 
Atlantic coast. 

All this has been thrown away, because the British Jingo 
supports a Tory cabinet, which, while making theatrical 
demonstrations of imperialism, neglects imperial duties and 
betrays imperial interests. 

And look even at sober free trade Manchester, the com- 
munity which is supposed to understand the worth of money 
better than any other in the world. Has it really gained by 
its Jingo policy? Professing to be the stronghold of free 
trade, it rejected the great free-trader, John Bright, when 
in Sir John Bowring's'war he asked for justice to China. 
It rejected Mr. Gladstone when he sought the suffrages of 



54 SUGGESTIONS 

South-east Lancashire that he might reUeve Ireland from the 
insolent domination of an alien church. 

And now the great makers of cotton machinery are com- 
ing from Lancashire to establish factories in New Eng- 
land, and her spinning and weaving mill corporations are 
losing their markets and their profits. Of eighteen such 
corporations whose shares are quoted in the Econojnist, 
the highest November prices of common stock show a loss 
of $2,553,294 on the paid-up capital. Supposing that, in- 
stead of supporting the Jingoes, Manchester had sent men 
to Parliament who would support a wise and conservative 
policy in the colonies, Newfoundland included, would it not 
have been better for her interests, to say nothing of 
principle .'' 

The Newfoundlanders in Boston, Mass., held a public 
meeting there on the i6th of February, at which the Rev. 
Frederick Woods, their chairman, said : " If we could only 
take our old island, and lay her at the feet of Uncle Sam ! 
I wish we could." And every suggestion of annexation to 
the United States was applauded by the Newfoundlanders 
present. 

The Newfoundlanders on the island desire annexation 
just as much, but they dare not say so, for they are starv- 
ing ; and those who venture to suggest separation from 
England would be punished by the withdrawal of charity, if 
not by even sterner means. 

They are justified in their desire ; for England has been 
disloyal to them, and holds the island by no better right 
than that by which Turkey holds Armenia. 

Let that England, who expects every man to do his duty, 
do her own. Let her, first of all, relieve the suffering. 

Second. Let her press on the completion of the railroad 
at English expense to Port aux Basques as quickly as pos- 
sible, and subsidize a mail line between England and the 
American Continent by way of a Newfoundland port, hold- 
ing the railroad property as security for money expended. 



SUGGESTIONS 55 

Third. Let her modify her fiscal system so as to give a 
x^^Xfree trade, not only to the Newfoundland fisherman, but 
also to those of Great Britain and Ireland, so that the for- 
eigner shall not be able to deprive British subjects either of 
their home or foreign markets. A small import duty on all 
fish imported into the British Isles, except from Newfound- 
land, and a bounty on the exports equal to that given by 
France, will suffice. 

Fourth. Let her aid the unfortunate victims of her Lord 
Clan-Rackrents to find comfortable farms and holdings in 
those parts of the French shore and along the railroad 
which are suitable for settlement. 

If she does this, she may derive some comfort from at 
least one passage in her Prayer Book, — " When the wicked 
man turneth away from the wickedness that he has com- 
mitted, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall 
save his soul alive. " 



APPENDIX. 



NEWFOUNDLAND'S RESOURCES. 

Providence, R.I., U.S.A., Feb. i8, 1895. 

Since I wrote the foregoing pages, some papers have 
come into my hands referring to Major-general Dashwood's 
attacks upon the credibility of those who are trying to 
make the resources of Newfoundland known in Great 
Britain. 

Much depends on the point of view from which a man 
writes ; and I can only say that, if the distinguished Major- 
general is right, y>7;;;/ a purely British point of T'ieia, in de- 
preciating the island and its resources, he thereby furnishes 
a very strong argument why Great Britain should, for a 
reasonable co7npensatioji, cede this island to the United States. 
I am perfectly sure that the majority of the 200,000 
inhabitants would not have the slightest objection to 
exchange the Union Jack for the stars and stripes. But I 
do not think that, in making this exchange myself, I 
have abandoned my old English habits of thought ; and so 
I would mention some reasons why, even if I were still a fel- 
low-citizen (or should I say subject .'' ) of Major-general 
Dashwood, and were as much bound as he is to place the 
interests of the British crown above every other interest of 
my life, I should for that very reason differ with him in 
opinion, first of all, from a strategic point of view. We 
must not, because my distinguished fellow-citizen. Captain 
Mahan, has so brilliantly painted the sea-power of England, 
forget also her manpower. Most certainly. Viscount Wolse- 
ley would not do so ; and I think Major-general Dashwood, 
from whose interesting little book, " Chipplequorgan," I 



58 LUMBERING INDUSTRY 

have learned that he came with his regiment to HaUfax 
after the " Trent " affair, will agree with me that it would 
then, in case of a war with the United States of America, have 
been very convenient if Newfoundland had been peopled 
by half a million hardy farmers, woodmen, and miners, in 
addition to its few fisher-folk. England has to take vmder- 
grown and underfed boys into her army now ; but, if the 
sturdy Irishmen who have been driven to the United States 
by famine and eviction had been provided each with the 
"three acres and a cow" of Joseph Chamberlain's speeches 
in the valleys of the Humber or Codroy Rivers, surely the 
experience of Louisbourg and a hundred well-fought battles 
since then may tell us how much more they would have con- 
tributed to Britain's honor and interest than they do now 
as American voters. The south-western part of Newfound- 
land reminds one very much of old Ireland in its climate 
and its physical features, and certainly is quite as well fitted 
to sustain a sturdy peasantry of small land-owners. 

The best answer to the distinguished officer's objections 
may be found in the official reports of the geological survey 
of Newfoundland, published by Edward Stanford, Charing 
Cross, London. The present director of that survey, Mr. 
James P. Howley, F.R.G.S., has replied in part to Major- 
general Dashwood's remarks in a letter written a fortnight 
ago, from which I extract a few passages. The Major-gen- 
eral said at the Royal Geographical Society that the timber 
of Newfoundland is all scrub, and fit only for firing. Mr. 
Howley writes : " Our lumbering industry is in a most flour- 
ishing condition. Ten large saw-mills are in full swing, 
besides several smaller ones, around our northern and 
western bays. Large shipments of lumber were made last 
summer to the English markets. Messrs. Watson & Todd, 
of Liverpool, England, purchased 3,000,000 feet of lumber 
in the island last summer ; and the market quotations 
in the Liverpool trade journals will be the best index to 
the value of the lumber. The Exploits Milling Company 



COAL DEPOSITS 



59 



at Botwoodsville purchased $25,000 worth of stores in 
Montreal to be used in the winter's lumber-felling opera- 
tions. They calculate on cutting 100,000 pine loo-s. 
Though the mill has been ten years in operation, the lumber 
shows no signs of exhaustion ; while the other and far more 
abundant products of the Newfoundland forests, such as fir, 
spruce, birch, tamarack, etc., have scarcely been touched. 

"The Benton Mill, owned by Messrs. Reid, contractors 
for the Northern & Western Railroad, though scarcely a 
year in existence, has put out 3,000,000 feet of first-class 
lumber." 

As to the coal fields, Mr. Howley, referring to his own 
official reports for 1889, 189 1, and 1892, as published by 
Stanford, writes : — 

In the Bay St. George coal fields 16 distinct seams 
were discovered, ranging from a few inches up to several 
feet in thickness : the Clearyseam has 26 inches good coal; 
Juke's seam, 4.6 feet; Murray seam, 5.4 feet; Howley 
seam, 4.2 feet. 

In the Grand Lake carboniferous area 15 distinct seams 
were discovered, also ranging from a few inches to several 
feet. Two seams on Coal Brook show 2.4 and 3.5 feet. 
On Aldery Brook, three seams show 2.6 feet, 3.8 feet, and 
14 feet of coal. At Kelvin Brook 3 seams contain 2.6 feet, 
3.8 feet, and 7 feet. 

Specimens have been submitted to experts in connection 
with the Colonial Office, and have been found, in some cases, 
superior to the Cape Breton coal. So much for the report 
of a man who understands his business, and has had better 
opportunities than any other living man of studying the 
question. 

For myself, I may say that during twenty years of travel, 
in which I have been from the Gulf of Mexico to Ottawa, 
and from the Straight Shore of Avalon to the Muir Glacier 
of Alaska, I have studied every State which I have visited 
with a view to its attractions for British emigrants, and, 



6o England's duty 

before the passing of our present absurd immigration laws, 
have been instrumental in transferring many skilled opera- 
tives from the foul slums of Manchester and Salford to the 
healthy and pleasant factory villages of New England. 

I need hardly say that Newfoundland is not the right 
place for such men ; but, under a just and wise imperial 
government, it can be made a happy home for thousands of 
hardy Scotch and Irish peasants, who need not, in crossing 
the ocean, change their political allegiance. But England 
must first do her duty. 

She must build her railroad from Port aux Basques along 
the French shore to Bonne Bay, or further north, so as to 
give the people a means of communication which shall not 
be impeded by the French treaty rights ; and she must ar- 
range her tariffs so as to defend her fishermen against the 
unjust discrimination of foreign bounties. As an American, 
I can have no interest in saying these things to Englishmen. 
If Major-general Dashwood is right, so much the better 
for us. 

Our Whitneys are awakening new life amid the ruins of 
Louisbourg, although the Duke of York and those who fol- 
lowed him as proprietors of the Sydney coal fields could do 
so little with them ; and so, if England cannot help New- 
foundland, Atneyica caft, and can serve herself well at the 
same time. Take the fishing for an instance. The French 
bounties do not hurt the Massachusetts fishermen, because 
we have a hoine market which the Frenchmen cannot touch, 
and seek only a foreign market for the very small quantity 
that our own people do not consume. And to share in this 
American home market alone would be more profitable to 
Newfoundland than all its connection with England can 
ever be. 

J. F. 



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